A Boring Life???

Guilt, anger, and resentment are really heavy burdens for us to haul around.  Just think of all the energy it takes to control, deny, stifle these so, so human, emotions  within ourselves.  On the other hand, how free we feel, how energized we feel, when we give ourselves the freedom to feel, experience, express and let go (give to God) of these feelings.  Think about how energized you feel when you blow you stack and let go of what has been bottled up.  Our energy is drained when we journey  burdened under the weight of guilt, anger and resentment.   We will find our lives being very dull, uninteresting, tedious and above all, very boring.  (The "B" in garbage.)

Jesus tells us He has come, "That we may have life, and have it to the, fullest.”He wished His joy-full love upon each one of us, so  that our joy might be complete. So what has happened to this "joy of life?"  What has happened that has caused us to lose our zest for life?  What has caused us to see life and our relationships through the eyes of indifference and boredom?  Why do we go about with feelings of boredom, masking anger?  John O'Donohue,  "Anam Cara" has these challenging thoughts.  When we become bored with life, in all of its forms, I hope the following will enable you to come to a deeper understanding of who you are and the mystery, The Paschal Mystery, unfolding in each and every moment of your daily living. "  (Lord, grant that I might see. ) The awakening of the human spirit is a homecoming.  Yet, ironically our sense of familiarity often militates against our homecoming.  When we are familiar with something, we lose the energy, edge and excitement of it."   

Friendships and relationships suffer immense numbing through the mechanism of familiarization.   We reduce the wildness and mystery of person and landscape to the external, familiar image.  Familiarity enables us to tame, control and ultimately forget the mystery.  We make our peace with the surface as image and we stay away from the Otherness and fecund turbulence of the unknown that it masks.  Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation. 

People have difficulty awakening to their inner world especially when their lives have become overly familiar to them.  They find it hard to discover something, new, unique or adventurous in their numbed lives.  Yet, everything we need for our journey has already been given to us.  Consequently, there is great strangeness in the shadowed light of our soul world.  We should become more conversant with our reserved soul-light.  The first step in awakening to your inner life and to the depth and promise of your solitude would be to consider yourself for a little while as a stranger to your own deepest depths.  To decide to view yourself as a complete stranger, someone who has just stepped ashore in your life, is a liberating exercise.  This meditation helps to break the numbering stranglehold of complacency and familiarity.  Gradually you begin to sense the mystery and magic of yourself."

We are encouraged to look at the familiar  until it becomes a stranger to us. 

The following quote is from Henri M. Nouwen's book, "Here and Now - Living the Spirit."  "Joy is essential to spiritual life.  Whatever we may think of say about God, when we are not joyful, our thoughts and words cannot bear fruit.  Jesus reveals to us God's love so that His joy may become ours and that our joy may become complete.   Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally love and that nothing - sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death can take that love away.  Joy is not the same as happiness.   We can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there because it comes from the knowledge of God's love for us."

It is essential for us to accept the fact  at every moment of our lives we have an opportunity to choose joy. There is joy when we grow in the acceptance that we are witnesses to the dynamics of The Paschal Mystery to each and person God chooses to place in our lives. What great faith our God has placed in us.  We are the contemporary manifestation of The suffering Jesus, Who became The Risen Christ, AFTER three days being in the tomb.  Whatever was happening in the darkness of the tomb happens to us in the darkness of our tomb time. Life then is always the lived experience of having to deal with opposites. We are asked challenged to accept joy and sorrow, success and failure, love and hate, war and peace, this dynamic  is endless.  We do not live in the either/or, but in the growing acceptance of the, both/and.  This acceptance is an essential exercise in the birthing process. From what I have seen in movies, and on TV birthing is not a boring exercise. It demands supreme physical and emotional effort. You actually have to be trained to face this encounter, with emerging life. This is the Lenten season. Year after year we go back to the school of spirituality, to be formed anew for the new experience of the emergence of The Risen Christ.  A boring life??????